and she spoke words that would melt in your hands and she spoke words of wisdom
Salt and brine bite at the mare’s lips almost as sharply as the cold as she stands on the edge of one of the ancient wooden docks that border the sea, staring out at the tumultuous, depthless grey surface of the Terminus. The waves are up today, splashing cold water across the already-slick wood in a foaming spray, but, in spite of the cold and the poor weather, – Seraphina thinks that she can smell a storm in the distance, if the wisps of dark clouds hovering at the far edges of the waves are any indication, and, for the gods’ sake, that’s the last thing they need – figures swarm around the docks. A group of children, no more than a few months old, play fight near the edge of the pier; a big, sand-colored colt shrieks and flutters his feathered wings in a childish mimicry of a teryr, and a trio of brave guards, led by a small, quick commander lead the fight against him. One of the guards steps too close to the edge and slips, nearly careening over the edge and falling into the waves below, but she steps forward in one smooth stride and closes the space between them, pressing her dark muzzle into his side and pushing him upright. He stares up at her, brilliantly green eyes wide with alarm, and, edging away, mutters his sheepish thanks. His eyes linger on her collar for a fraction of a second. “Mmm,” comes her noncommittal response. “Just be careful.” The small group nods, as though she is chiding them, and they quickly back away from the edges, towards the sandstone roads that border the maze of piers. A far better place for them to play, she thinks, though she has the feeling that she’d scared them off – although the queen had been in her role for the better part of two years, now, she had the feeling that she’d gotten no better at setting her people at ease. None of them knew her, here, and she could take some comfort in the quiet that her anonymity provided, but, then, all that they knew of her was around her neck. The children might know whispers of what the thin band of silver represented, but they could not know how grateful she was that their stares did not hold the same fear and apprehension that she’d grown so accustomed to in the past – they could not know that, rather than filling her with a certain sternness, that it delighted her in some passive way to see them simply playing along the docks, that they only played at war, rather than fighting it themselves, that they, though poor, perhaps orphaned, wore no collars around their necks. It was surprising, she thought, to see how quickly the past became something inconceivable, at least to the young.
The wind twisted through her long masses of white hair, brushing it into her eyes, and she cursed herself inwardly for leaving it loose that morning. Her eyes linger for a moment longer on the children, and she wonders how they’re handling the cold – if they have been ushered to shelter from it, or, as children thrown out on the street often do, they shy away from authority and stay in the cold. Her gaze catches on a passing sailor, and, with a flick of her snowy tail, she strides towards him. He stands alert at her approach, snorting. “Do you know those children?” Her tone is cool and eerie – a question in phrasing but not in intonation. “Only in passing.” His accent, she notes, is foreign; she wonders from where he hails. “The sandy one – his mater used to care for the bunch of them. But now she’s dead. Solis knows what happened.” He eyes her suspiciously. “Why do you ask, lass?” “It’s cold, to leave them out on the streets,” she says, simply, and brushes on past him without another word. She’ll send someone to fetch them tonight, if they can find them; it’s dangerous for children to be out on their own. (Gods know there are still slavers about, and this snow…) The guards can take them to shelter, though she knows that it’s a flip of the coin if they stay. Children like that don’t trust authority.
Exhaling clouds of glistening white, she continues her patrol down the docks.
In the heavy blue she moved. The cacophonous red pacing of her unholy heart thrashed against the silence that held a finger to her lips, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, over and over again in the heartbreaking hum of a collision that unfolded before her eyes a thousand times and back again. Where did her mind end and the blood begin? What, in this chaos - in this solitude, had she become? It was a question she could not face for fear of the answers that lay in its wake. The glasshewn threads holding her together glinted in the moonlight, revealing a skeleton filled with a cyclonic emptiness that rattled between the hollow of her bones, left alone to scream into the night without a soul to hear its plight. For was not that the nature of grief? To drain the very light from one's life and leave them with only the husk of their flesh and skin, damned to wander this dark barren earth with only their perforated honeycomb memories.
The mountain had been calling her name. Rhoswen, it whispered at the birth of every new moon, Rhoswen, it hummed in the floodlight of the sun. At first it had been easy to ignore: it had been nothing but an itch at the back of her neck. But slowly it had grown into a plague that set her body aflame. And for the first time in a long time the woman felt something beyond the eternal grey torpor that had woven its way into her very essence. What that feeling was she could not, would not, name. And from the shadows she had come; patiently, obediently. The violet blush of a new dawn had begun to bloom by the time she reached Veneror's foothills, and the kaleidoscopic light fractured in such a way behind the mountain's crest that it almost broke her heart to gaze upon it.
How good it felt, the sun hot enough to make his coat shiny with sweat, the sand in his teeth. Acton had never been made for the cold.
Neither, of course, had Solterra. Just to see it back to the way it ought to be (painfully bright, each eye he met glittering with challenge) felt like a good omen, like maybe everything could go back to normal. Never mind that normal had once meant war.
All this to say Acton felt more alive than he had in months as he clattered his way across the bazaar, looking for Bexley.
He missed her more than he missed the Crows, more than Reichenbach, more than knowing his place in the underbelly hierarchy of the Night Court. He missed her the way he missed who he used to be, before everything went sideways.
What a relief it was to feel his heart kick back into that battle-drum rhythm the moment he saw her, talking to some poor messenger with a look that could singe a lion. It was a lucky thing whatever business they had concluded by the time Acton arrived at her side; he wasn’t the kind to stand politely by.
Nor was he worried about the stares of others (more likely that he enjoyed them) as he pressed his muzzle to the crook of her neck like he needed to touch her, breathe her in, just to make sure she was real.
“Been a while, Goldilocks,” he said at last between his grin, pulling away only enough to meet the bright glass blue of her eye. “Figured you’d been missing me long enough.”
the moth don't care when he sees the flame
he might get burned, but he's in the game
Truth be told, Basil was adjusting to their status with more alacrity than they thought they'd possessed. It was difficult, of course, to remember that they were no longer the shrinking violet who prayed their presence went unnoticed; every habit was hard to break, and this was no different. Each step was a lesson in projecting poise, but now it become a lesson in command while poised. It felt akin to balancing on a tightrope — too callous and they would face the same violence their parents and cousins had met; too soft and their remaining family members would devour them alive.
Perhaps some day, in the distant future, there would come a day when Basileios held more pride in their status and less constrained dread. It might be a long ways off, obscured by the clouds of uncertainty, but it was there alongside it's faithful steed, Hope.
For now, Basil hefts their heavy load of scrolls, some of them flecked with unsavory brownish stains, towards the Court's libraries. The scrolls are some of Azhade's oldest and, though their stories are likely duplicates, Basil would rather the historians have a chance to search through them than condemn useful information to the sands of time. It is good luck, or poor luck, that as Basil is trotting along, head down to make sure they don't lose any of their precious cargo, that dark, striped legs swim into view— their abrupt skid to a halt tumbles several scrolls from their grasp.
"Sorry—" they sputter, narrowly missing colliding with the legs' owner, as they scramble to pick up the dusty tomes. "Oh— I was so worried— No, they're okay," they nervously reassure themself before their brain catches up with them. "O-oh. Seraphina. Um, good afternoon," they manage, after a moment spent gaping, ears sinking as they sketch out a bow before their sovereign. Seraphina elicits more than just nervous awe from them— her silver collar evokes that particular shame that surrounds their family's part in the regime that strangled so many young lives. Looking like a blundering idiot in front of the person they so desperately wanted to impress was only half their flustered state.
Basileous shyly looks down, away, at the tile that is suddenly more interesting than Seraphina. "I'm sorry, it was rude of me to go scrambling around," they apologize again, slipping so easily back into the reserved, wallflower persona that had kept them safe from their family's notice.
Tonight Isra is far from the bonfires and the merchants. Tonight she is in the deep dark where it's cobwebs, soot and hints of brine that arch above her head like a canopy. Here she walks with ghosts and sorrows nipping at her heels like feral, rabid mutts. There is nothing but blackness ahead of her broken up by soft thin pricks of moonlight when the clouds shift and the overhang of old silk is rotten and thin enough to blow away like paper.
Part of her feels at home here in the silence with cobwebs clinging to her skin when she walks too close to a wall or a broken cart that hasn't yet been repaired. Each of her steps feels like the closing of a circle and the chime of her hooves the hard sound of a leather book closing for the final time.
Only mice, pygmy dragons and orphans walk with her here. When a dirty yearling turns a thin, broken sneer her way she turns a bit of stone to a apple and when their friends join them a pile of rubble becomes a sack of grain. The mice get bits of dust turned to corn and the dragons small gemstones to bring back to their nests. Bit by bit she fills their bellies, their wants and cobwebs tangle in her horn until she brushes them clean on that rotten canopy of cloth.
And soon the darkness doesn't feel so dark, not when she touches her cheek to the walls and turns them to mirrors to reflect the light through the alleyways. Around her this dark forgotten place of the market comes alive with song and someone both foolish and brave takes a match to a pile of rubble and laughs when it burns.
Isra watches them all and her smile feels bright enough to be a necklace of pearls held between her lips. For hours it feels like she watches them while she still clings to the last bit of darkness in the market and lets them praise the goddess for their sudden change in fate.
She did not need to become a queen to want this but somehow it feels both sweet and bitter to watch them and think that they all partly belong to her now.
How crooked her circle grew before it ate its own beginning.
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Florentine has followed a shadow here.
Together the girls now stand amidst the rolling grasses of the prairie. The meadow is a sea, and stems lap at Florentine’s legs. They tap against her skin, each one reminding her of a memory she might have hoped to forget.
But there is no forgetting when Denocte is full of ghosts. There are memories as twisted as the unicorn’s horn that spirals up into the sky. But none are as graceful as that horn and none are as beautiful as the sky that dances so high above.
The colours dance upon the other girl’s skin. Her mahogany coat is a black canvas in the midnight light. Upon it the myriad lights of the Borealis dance. Gold was no canvas for such a spectacle and so Florentine stands, gilded and plain in a land made for the beauty of the dark alone.
What stories did the girls possess? Oh Flroentine has many, so many she cannot remember them all. So many she has not yet lived out them all. Though infinite Time calls out to her from the edges. It whispers to its traveller girl. Yes, Florentine has too many stories and she never thinks to put any to tongue. So it is that intrigue has her stepping close. It has her eyes rising up the Night Queen’s spiral horn and up, up, up into the shifting sky.
“Hello Isra.” Florentine says to the song of stars and lights. Petals scatter, to fall upon the grasses and rest into the upturned palms of wild flowers. She follows them down upon bended knee, dropping into a curtsey she once made so sweetly. Ah, it is easier to offer a curtsey than to receive. So she does not linger long, but rises like the dawn sun and lets her eyes lift to a newer queen. “Do you have a story for me?” Her head tilts, curious, her lips holding a smile so secret. “I believe I must thank you for saving, Lysander. Since becoming mortal he cannot be trusted to keep himself alive. So the battle continues.”
And it is with that that Florentine comes to rest beside the Night Queen, her gaze tipped up to the sky. “Please make it a good story...” The girl whispers, “One enough to show me that my brother’s decision to bring us here was not in vain.”
@Isra - we can do this! -psychs self up- Let's make it to the end!
But you had to have him, and so you did // Some things you let go in order to live
There is a wistful longing in the air and in the way the sandy streets raise up longingly beneath Basileios' cloven hooves; the kiss of spring sun glinting down through the hazy, wind-bitten clouds, a touch of sun despite the severe weather. It aches of a return to normalcy and, like the weather, they find themselves lingering beneath archways with their eyes drifting over lovers and friends alike. Their shadow has been missing since their family's slaughter and is it not their father or mother's absence that leaves them wanting.
They haunt the liminal spaces of the Day Court, a ghost dressed in gold, but there are no spirits within sight, no longing gazes to be met and challenged. The shackles are gone— but so is their playmate.
The Colosseum rises before and betwixt them, a prodigious monument to both Solis' power and the hubris of the Old Regime. Their skin shudders in agony as they step into the sandy stands; how many times had they been forced to watch from the nobles' boxes as the stallion they loved scrabbled against foes to ensure his survival? Basil tipped their muzzle low, arching their neck as if to bear the weight of their lived experiences.
There were no shadows to be found here, only long-buried memories best left to the sands of Time itself. And yet— a glimmer against the far column, a flash of hooves. Basil tenses, takes a step forward, and hesitates, expression blossoming with undisguised yearning and a foalish hopefulness. They are torn between calling out and remaining silent, fearing their eyes are mistaken and wishing fervently they are not.
Finally, steps so flighty they seem to skim the ground, they slip after the elusive figure.
Home is no refuge, and the streets are nearly as bad. Basil kicks a door closed behind them, cutting off the outraged squawks of relatives and their 'retainers' alike. Change comes inelegantly to some and the Azhade are no exception. It is not the first time, nor the last time, that Basil will slam the door in their cousin's face in favor of sequestering themself in the house's gardens— nor will they apologize for it when their cousin's visits are scarcely more than ambushes.
Once within the garden, the quietude is oppressive, all trickling water and date palms, that sets the Kathiawari more on edge. It is just such a facade— they feel as though they are an actor on a set, no more in control of their life than a thespian of the script.
They take to the streets, slipping out of sight from their still-raging cousin and his gaggle of liveried servants, in an uncharacteristically stealthy maneuver. The snows have scarcely thawed from the blizzards that plagued the desert and, shivering, Basil almost regrets their decision. Thankfully, there was a tea shop not far from their house that was almost as good as home, even when they were considered something of a pariah by a third of the Day Court and most of the Azhade family.
The door tinkles merrily as they enter, greet both the warmth and the smiling host, and gratefully recline on the proffered rug. Their low table is small, in the center of the room where guests are frequently joined by strangers, but a brazier is nearby and that is all Basil will ask for until their hot mint tea arrives with a freshly made crepe arabique. Then, maybe, the only desire will be good company, extra honey, and perhaps a little shisha for the room's hookah.
Home is supposed to be Denocte, isn't it, her birthplace? At one point, she had been certain it was Terrastella, and even now as she steps up cobblestones and hears the thud of her heavy hooves, as she adjusts her head with the massive partial skull mask on her face... nothing had quite rung true like Solterra. As the sands had, the heat and blistering temperatures. She's truly home now, isn't she, and behind her, she can hear the thump and thump of steps.
Enyo might be long but she's only nineteen feet tall or so, able to duck her head under arches and shake herself, rumbling deep in her chest and flexing her clawed fingers, eyeing horses that scattered at the sight of her. 'This is small.' It's a grumble in her mind, and Jaxis only smirks, hooves coming to a halt as the Indominus steps up to her side, rumbling and half crouching, half laying next to her, stretching on warm stone and cooing like pleased beast.
"Small.. but warm. You'll be fine. You can find larger areas here." The courtyard was mostly unused as far as Jaxis knows, and she's certain that even now it might be, but she'll have to talk to others, won't she? For now, she's certain she's just made a spectacle of herself.
He almost longed for the nightmares of his foalhood, where at least he could process his anxious days away. Now, it was nothingness that he saw from the time his eyes closed until they crept back open, fighting heaviness that proclaimed his restlessness. One might argue that he was simply forgetting, but he would argue back for they were vividly dark and lasting and holding him hostage in his sleep. He tried to contrive meaning from them, but reason failed to explain one. Reason failed him more and more these days. It was not the old, reliable friend he was used to.
These were the sullen thoughts he tried to ban as he roused for the day. Blyse inhaled deeply as he rolled his shoulders back, little pops and cracks rewarding his stretch and flooding his limbs with warmth and comfort. Then he exhaled and clouds of his warm breath turned white as they greeted the cool morning air. Now that was an old friend come home—the cold. Even though the buds were in bloom, the mornings still had a biting chill this high in the mountains to remind you of the altitude. He welcomed its bite. After all, he had to cross that blasted desert for the first (and he sincerely hoped only) time the days before. He could stand to never see sand for what remain of his part-lived life. In fact, he was especially resentful towards the sun for bearing down on his back so relentless all that time. Perhaps it wasn’t all that strange he dreamed of darkness.
He has almost gathered enough senses to begin his day when the crack of a limb put him on guard. He snapped his eyes toward the sound and peered untrustingly in to the thicket. He quietly squared himself, ivory hooves as gentle on the earth as his steady breath. He stayed silent, beckoning the sound to come again.
@Isra // ugh, I chose. We’re not too far from home, at least.
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